American comedian Bill Maher pushed back on his podcast, Club Random, on Monday when his guest, a Jewish actress and comedian, said that antisemitism came mainly from the political right.
“I tell you where it comes from, it comes from the right-wing, the extreme—,” said Sandra Bernhard of “Roseanne,” among other shows and films.
Maher cut in. “No, it doesn’t,” he said, noting that although the right wing had the “nonsense” of the chant, “The Jews will not replace us,” the political left “is even worse.”
“That is coming down from elite colleges who see everything only through a racial lens. They are stupid. They don’t know history,” he said. “They think everything is about colonizers and racists, and how awful America is.”
“America has done some bad things, but to drag Israel into this as the stand-in for every bad thing White people ever did—this is not any more complicated to most of these college kids than the Palestinians are brown and poor and the Israelis are rich and white,” he added.
Maher also defended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when Bernhard said he was “solidly to blame for everything that’s happening right now.”
“He is so not to blame for everything that’s happening,” Maher said. “That’s the fault of the Palestinian people and the religion of Islam, which gets lost in all of this.” (Maher, a longtime critic of religion, wrote and starred in the 2008 film “Religulous,” a portmanteau of “religion” and “ridiculous.”)
“Right now is happening because for years, Hamas took aid money and instead of buying food with it and building buildings and hospitals, they bought bombs and made tunnels,” the comedian stated.
